In much of the Middle East, news that the US and Iran had come to a fragile agreement was greeted with relief tempered with doubt that any deal would resolve the turbulent region’s deep problems or even prevent a future return to war.
In Kuwait, a frequent target of Iranian drone strikes during the 15-week conflict, Iyad Joumma, a 37-year-old Jordanian engineer, spoke for many.
While the agreement may allow the region to catch its breath, he said, its success “will depend on the ability of the parties involved to address the root causes of the tensions”.
Of a dozen analysts and experts consulted by the Guardian since the news of a potential end to hostilities broke at the weekend, not one suggested the interim deal to be signed on Friday by representatives of Iran and the US would be any more than a temporary solution.
“It’s just a big Band-Aid and future conflict is like to come and some point,” said Neil Quilliam, a Middle East expert at London’s Chatham House.
The memorandum of understanding provides for a 60-day cessation of hostilities during which the two sides will address some of the most contentious issues – Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and nuclear programme, sanctions and the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets – in the hope that a final settlement can be reached.
Few analysts believe this is likely within such a short timescale – if at all.
They point to the painstaking 18-month process that led to the 2015 agreement with Iran which traded economic benefits for restrictions of its nuclear programme, and which Donald Trump tore up during his first term in office.
The interim deal now agreed does little more than commit both sides to further talks, while obliging Washington to lift its naval blockade of Iran and making Tehran allow free passage to all shipping in the strait of Hormuz, which usually carries a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid gas supplies but was blocked by Iran early in the war.
To the great displeasure of Israel, a ceasefire has been imposed once again in Lebanon as part of the interim deal and appears for the moment to be holding.
But such ceasefires count for little these days, said several experts, pointing to Gaza as an example, where almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since Donald Trump brokered an end to the war there last year. Israel has occupied more than 60 per cent of the territory, Hamas has not given up its weapons, and there has been almost no progress towards a projected second phase of the deal, let alone the third, which was to have seen a massive reconstruction effort.
“Gaza is a case in point. The deal there didn’t contend with the past: the war crimes that had been committed. Nor the present: how to disarm Hamas. Nor the future: a pathway to a viable Palestinian state and a resolution of the conflict,” said Alia Brahimi at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “It’s almost as if … you can use the cover of a ceasefire to continue to achieve your aims, including military ones.”
But this is not possible in the Gulf, Brahimi said, because the strategic geography is different.
“The strait of Hormuz is of integral importance to the global economy, as the Iranians have demonstrated. They’ve shown us what we always knew in theory: that they can impose cascading stress globally by throwing a few projectiles towards a tanker or two.”
Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at al-Azhar University in Gaza and now in Cairo, agreed.
“The ceasefire in Gaza is holding because Hamas knows that if they fire it will give a pretext for another full-scale Israeli ground invasion but the situation in Gaza is disastrous,” he said.
In Israel there is dismay and disappointment at a deal that does not appear to address Iran’s ballistic missile armoury nor funding of its so-called Axis of Resistance, a loose coalition of militant Islamist movements including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and a series of militia in Iraq.
This too could threaten instability in the near future, analysts argue.
Danny Orbach, a military history professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, said that that after the bloody surprise October 2023 Hamas raid which triggered the Gaza war, Israel had set out to bring about structural change in the Middle East.
“The structural change [Israel wants] is that the ‘Axis of Resistance’ must no longer be allowed to threaten Israel with destruction. Israel’s destabilising instinct is to tell all regional actors you will not have stability until you solve our problem, and that problem is Iran. This will not change until the memory of [the] 7 October [attack] fades and that will take years and years.”
The sharpest shock, however, is being felt in the Sunni Arab Gulf states, where the stability behind decades of economic growth and growing diplomatic heft has been sharply challenged.
It will take months or even years for damage to civilian infrastructure done by Iran’s strikes on Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to be repaired, and the psychological scars will last much longer. Meanwhile, Washington’s clear unwillingness to accept significant losses, months of potential economic pain or domestic dissatisfaction send a clear message.
“A ‘superpower’ that is not ready to bear 100 casualties is not a superpower,” said Orbach.
H.A. Hellyer, of London’s Royal United Services Institute, said that Gulf states would now seek to contain a newly empowered Iran led by a more confident and possibly more belligerent regime.
“The realisation that they can’t rely on the US is the point of consensus but otherwise [Gulf states] have all got different views of the best strategy going forward,” Hellyer said. “The Arab world has important and legitimate grievances with how Iran projects power and influence and none of these are being addressed.”
Quilliam described a “new era”.
“The [current] agreement will hold and in 60 days we will probably see positive headlines and the oil and gas will flow [again] but there’ll be no major breakthrough,” he said.
“We know that Hormuz can be closed again, the Iranians have carried out strikes on Gulf states, and we have seen that whatever Israel and the US can do, Iran will take it. All the previous thresholds have been passed now.”
